Commentary: Making life better for families will heal fractured city

Make Costa Mesa better for families.

In all my public service in Costa Mesa — through five years on the Planning Commission, six years on the City Council and nearly four years on the school board — this has been my goal, the bedrock of my decision-making.

And it is why I am again running for the City Council.

I am proud of what I and other council members, the city staff and the community were able to accomplish in my time on the council from 2004 to 2010.

We created a sports complex and a skateboard park and added lights and fields to other parks, deeply enriching the lives of children and families throughout the city.

We paid a lot of attention to infrastructure, repaving and improving streets from one end of the city to the other.

We created a green task force to find ways to make City Hall and all city facilities cleaner and more efficient, reducing solid waste and emissions and increasing energy efficiency in city operations.

We worked with the Police Department on giving the proper tools and support to its graffiti and gang task forces, and saw a marked reduction of those problems during my terms.

We worked with the private sector to advance some major projects that benefited the city, including The Camp, The Lab Antimall and the IKEA Home Ranch project, as well as the new concert hall and other iimprovements at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts.

I, and many others, worked very hard to put on the ballot and pass a long-overdue increase in the city’s transient occupancy tax, enhancing an important revenue stream for the city at no cost to its taxpayers.

And, crucially, I stood firmly against the proposed sale of our fairgrounds. I met repeatedly with then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and members of the state Legislature and finally was among the plaintiffs who went to court to stop what would have been a bad deal for the city and its families.

Through it all, I was proud of relationships I was able to build with the city’s employees. Their ideas, hard work and dedication were indispensible to our efforts to make Costa Mesa better for families.

In my term on the Newport-Mesa district board, my focus on families was only sharpened. I am proud to say that we were able to increase funding for science at every school site and double the athletics and arts budgets.

We were able to complete or set in motion several projects to improve our campuses and their communities, including improvements to the theater and gyms at Estancia, field enhancements for baseball and softball at both high schools in the city, safety improvements on all elementary campuses, a new Costa Mesa Middle School enclave and theater, and the pending Costa Mesa High stadium.

In the next few months, the district will begin implementation of its new Signature Academy programs. These efforts will be critical to creating a rigorous academic environment and keeping the children in our neighborhoods attending our neighborhood schools.

What’s very important is we have improved our communication with employees, parents and the wider community. We challenged each school site to communicate more with the community about what’s happening at school. People can’t get involved at their schools if they don’t know what’s going on there.

Now I’m trying to return to the City Council, because that is where the work of making the city better for families is most needed today.

I want to get back to doing the necessary business of the city and stop all this drama in the community created by “gotcha” politics, fearmongering, blaming and blind ideology that rejects practical and proven approaches.

First and foremost, we need to address the dearth of police officers in the city created by the current council’s years of attacking and running down our public employees. The chief is trying to recruit more officers, but the build-back process is slow, and it’s hard to ask people to walk into a hostile environment that includes pending legal action that they must pay for as soon as they start the job.

Also, I’d like to continue the work begun with Measure L and focus on tourism as a way to increase revenue. The city needs to better partner with South Coast Plaza and the hospitality industry. It’s the easiest way to increase revenue to fund vital city services, and it doesn’t cost the taxpayers a penny.

A lot of work needs to be done to repair the damage of the past four years, but I’m confident there’s nothing we can’t accomplish — as long as we remember: “Make Costa Mesa better for families.”

Newport-Mesa school board Trustee KATRINA FOLEY is a former member of the City Council.